Civilization And Violence

Regimes of Representation in Nineteenth-Century Colombia

Cristina Rojas

Publication Year: 2001

Civilization and violence are not necessarily the antagonists we presume-with civilization taming violence, and violence unmaking civilization. Focusing on postindependence Colombia, this book brings to light the ways in which violence and civilization actually intertwined and reinforced each other in the development of postcolonial capitalism.

The narratives of civilization and violence, Cristina Rojas contends, play key roles in the formation of racial, gender, and class identities; they also provide pivotal logic to both the formation of the nation and the processes of capitalist development. During the Liberal era of Colombian history (1849-1878), a dominant creole elite enforced a "will to civilization" that sought to create a new world in its own image. Rojas explores different arenas in which this pursuit meant the violent imposition of white, liberal, laissez-faire capitalism. Drawing on a wide range of social theory, Rojas develops a new way of understanding the relationship between violence and the formation of national identity-not just in the history of Colombia, but also in the broader narratives of civilization.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

Foreword

Cristina Rojas’s Civilization and Violence defies singular classification.
Certainly it is about nineteenth-century Colombia. But the conceptual
scope of the study takes its significance well beyond the character
and political history of one state during its key nation-building
century. The investigation seeks, first, to address an issue that transcends
a particular...

Acknowledgments

Like many scholars born and raised in Colombia, I could not escape
the question “Why violence?” I am indebted to all the people who
helped me to understand the complexity and multiple dimensions
of violence. I benefited from my early encounter with the work of
Michael Shapiro, whose thoughts on representation and violence inspired
important parts of this book. I thank him and Carrie Mullen
for making possible...

Introduction: Civilization as History

Norbert Elias’s history of civilization in Western Europe points to
one of the major dilemmas for a scholar dedicated to the study of
violence and civilization in a Third World country. Toward the end
of the eighteenth century, when European nations believed that they
had achieved civilization within their own societies, they saw themselves
as “bearers of an existing or finished civilization to others, as
standard-bearers...

1. The Will to Civilization

The mid–nineteenth century in Colombia has been commonly characterized
as a period of economic liberalism. In this period Colombia
opened up to external markets and adopted laissez-faire principles.1
There is a strong tendency among historians of the nineteenth century
to take for granted that the incorporation of the country into the
world economy was the predominant desire on the part of the local
elite.2 The desire...

2. Civilization and Violence

A significant paradox of Colombian history is the long history of
violence and conflict that had been inserted into the democratic process.
In the nineteenth century, after the War of Independence in 1810
there were nine civil wars and nearly fifty regional or local conflicts,
most frequently in the period from 1863 to 1865. The questions frequently
asked...

3. The Political Economy of Civilization

The history of the development and geographical expansion of capitalism
has been told as a story about how things are produced, exchanged,
appropriated, and consumed. A concentration on the world
of things encourages a mode of reasoning wherein commodities and
labor are studied in abstraction from their social context. The discipline
of economics assigns itself the task of uncovering and formulating
universal laws...

4. The Subalterns’ Voices

The will to civilization as a regime of representation not only was
built in a process of exchange between a backward Latin America
and a civilized Europe, but emerged, as well, from the process of exchange
between dominating and subaltern voices. Subalterns were
not passive recipients of what was said by male creole literati voices.
As participants in...

5. The Will to Civilization and Its Encounter with Laissez-Faire

Scholars have turned to nineteenth-century Latin America in search
of answers to the riddles of development. In the nineteenth century,
Latin America opened up to external markets and the region adopted
laissez-faire principles. This makes it a relatively recent real-world
experiment whose results can be used to inform the liberal theory
and liberal policies...

6. Representation, Violence, and the Uneven Development of Capitalism

Throughout this book I have put forward the hypothesis that the relationship
between the development of capitalism and violence is better
understood if we factor in the formation of meanings that have
accompanied the expansion of capitalism, particularly meanings related
to differences, identities, civilization, and violence. In preceding
chapters I have conducted a critique of a political economy removed
from the world...

Conclusion: Civilizations—Clash or Desire?

These epigraphs illustrate well the main paradox addressed in this
book: the relationship between civilization and violence. Sigmund
Freud’s statement was a response to Albert Einstein’s question “Why
War?” which he formulated at the end of the First World War, and
Huntington’s was a proposal for a new paradigm for interpreting the
evolution of global...

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